Comic characters, Updike writes in an essay about humor, are "rubbery," with the ability to bounce back, whereas tragic ones tend to be brittle and stony and fated to "irrevocably shatter" under pressure.
In "Nicotina," he is a lonely hacker who declares his love and is shattered irrevocably by a nearly silent encounter through a doorway with a girl, sending him deeper into the complications of a diamond heist.
First, aside from the fact that it would be impossible to sustain such a show of force for a prolonged period of time, the indisputable fact is that the perceived aura and real hegemony of the regime's cornerstone (supreme leader) has been shattered irrevocably in the course of the post-June 2009 protests.
Russia's military offensive into Georgia has shattered, perhaps irrevocably, the strategy of three successive presidential administrations to coax Russia into alliance with the West and integration into its institutions.
You could just get lost in Tokyo and come out of it irrevocably changed, with your standards shattered.
If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered".
Drop one of those, and it will be irrevocably marked, scuffed, nicked and maybe even shattered".
And yet this handful of communities, whose sons emerged alive from the horrors of the trenches, offers a unique insight into the experience which shattered the pre-WWI order and, in turn, transformed society irrevocably.
This is not all: outside, lives are shattered, jobs are lost, marriages are destroyed, minds are damaged, friends and families are traumatised - often irrevocably so.
